Author: Ruth Glaeser The Third Circuit Court of Appeals held that Merck is exempt from antitrust claims under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine in a lawsuit accusing it of deceiving the government about the effectiveness of its mumps vaccine to prevent competition. Background from the Third Circuit’s Opinion Merck was the sole…
Author: Sabri Siraj In a landmark decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld a district court ruling to permanently enjoin the Northeast Alliance (NEA) between American Airlines and JetBlue Airways. This case offers key insights into the relationship between joint ventures and antitrust and the standards…
Author: Ruth Glaeser Recent news highlights a growing focus on government antitrust enforcement cases against companies accused of monopolizing markets and abusing their power. But let’s consider another question: if a company lacks sufficient market power to qualify as a monopolist, but competes with only one or a handful of…
Author: Sabri Siraj The Federal Trade Commission has survived a motion to dismiss in a high-stakes lawsuit against Amazon, igniting critical discussions about competition in the online marketplace. As a dominant player in global e-commerce, Amazon’s practices have long affected both consumers and competitors. Will this case change those practices…
Author: Jarod Bona Have you ever considered the idea that your business would be much more profitable if you didn’t have to compete so hard with that pesky competitor or group of competitors? Unless you lack competition—which is great for profits, read Peter Thiel’s book—this notion has probably crossed your…
Author: Luis Blanquez Two of the main pillars from the Biden Administration Antitrust Policy in 2023 have been an aggressive merger enforcement agenda and its crusade against Big Tech and vertical integration. On the merger side, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have published new Merger…
Author: Luis Blanquez We recently wrote about the Federal Trade Commission’s blog post explaining how relying on a common algorithm to determine your pricing decisions might violate Section 1 of the Sherman Act. The FTC has Algorithmic Price-Fixing in its Antitrust Crosshairs It was just a matter of time until…
Author: Steven Cernak Some of us have been asserting for years that Robinson Patman, the federal price-discrimination antitrust law, is merely “forgotten but not gone.” That is, while there has been no FTC enforcement in decades, a few private lawsuits are filed every year and careful potential defendants still follow…
Author: Luis Blanquez Are you delegating your pricing decisions to a common algorithm software platform? If so, you might violate the antitrust laws. It may not even matter whether you actually communicated with your competitors. All it might take is for the antitrust agencies—The Department of Justice or the Federal…
Author: Jarod Bona Do you or your competitor have a monopoly in a particular market? If so, your conduct or their conduct might enter Sherman Act, Section 2 territory, which we call monopolization. If you are in Europe or other jurisdictions outside of the United States, instead of monopoly, people…